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> The agency has lost more than a quarter of its staff, withdrawn directives to auditors to crack down on aggressive tax shelters and permitted other auditing e
by bilekas 8mo ago
> The agency has lost more than a quarter of its staff, withdrawn directives to auditors to crack down on aggressive tax shelters and permitted other auditing efforts to falter.
When you see a government doing this, you know they're not interested in collecting Tax from their rich buddies.
This case will sit in limbo for 20x years.
- yellow_lead 8mo agoOr they'll settle with Meta in a few years for a small fee with no admission of wrongdoing to save face.
- InkCanon 8mo agoMeta is actually at a huge disadvantage here. The IRS has a litigation success rate of 93%. It's an astoundingly successful legal entity.
- aljgz 8mo agoWhat's the success rate when data is limited to only very large companies, say top 50 in size?
- shagie 8mo agoThat's a success rate that largely is based on suing people who don't have the resources to fight it (no claims made about if they're right or not). However, the IRS has had reductions in staff and funding which made it harder to go after the bigger accounts who have more forensic accounting needing to be done to find the money in the various tax shelters. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/irs-faces-challenges-in-2026-tax-season-due-to-jobs-cuts-and-new-laws https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/irs-faces-challenges-in-... > "The IRS is simultaneously confronting a reduction of 27% of its workforce, leadership turnover, and the implementation of extensive and complex tax law changes" mandated by Republicans' tax and spending measure that President Donald Trump signed into law last summer, Collins said in her report. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-fiscal-impact-of-irs-staffing-cuts/ https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-fiscal-impact-o... (May 2025) > The Global High Wealth department of the IRS is designed to audit ultrawealthy individuals and corporations, who often hire highly sophisticated tax advisors to devise ways to avoid taxes and to respond to the IRS if they are challenged. But, as of late March, the department was cut by nearly 40 percent—and likely more by now with the additional RIFs. I would be willing to contend that while they've got a 93% overall, that's historical numbers and the teams that would go against Meta and others are severely understaffed.
- johnnyanmac 8mo agoMan who spent career evading taxes weakens tax collection system. Who would have thunk it?
- shagie 8mo agoWhile he's the most recent one, it's been a systemic problem that's largely been from congressional budget cuts. 2014 The War on the IRS https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/war-irs https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/war-irs 2015 Poor IRS Service Reflects Congress’s Deep Funding Cuts https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/poor-irs-service-reflects-congresss-deep-funding-cuts https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/poor-irs-service-r... 2018 How the IRS Was Gutted https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted 2020 Congressional Budget Office Confirms That IRS Budget Cuts Lose Money and Benefit the Rich https://itep.org/congressional-budget-office-confirms-that-irs-budget-cuts-lose-money-and-benefit-the-rich/ https://itep.org/congressional-budget-office-confirms-that-i...
- reactordev 8mo agoExactly. This is just one big tech fighting another big tech using the government as a weapon.
- spiderfarmer 8mo agoAt what point does the term “regime” become an accurate description of that government rather than a derogatory label?
- p_j_w 8mo agoWhen their agents execute people in the street with no repercussions.
- autoexec 8mo agoIn that case I can't think of time my country hasn't been a regime I guess. Police have pretty much always been executing people in the streets without repercussions. Although there has been a small amount of progress recently, these days they do it on camera and still face zero repercussions much of the time.
- kgwxd 8mo agoYup, and the people calling it out all this time were consistently shrugged off as being hyperbolic. Still are. Always will be.
- tempodox 8mo agoAre you suggesting that an accurate description would not be derogatory?
- kgwxd 8mo agoLong, long time ago. Accuracy don't matter to enough people though.
- wiml 8mo ago"Regime" is mostly derogatory among the terminally online. It's an accurate description of any government, regulatory system, zone of applicability of a natural law, etc etc.
- mothballed 8mo ago>..withdrawn directives to auditors to crack down on aggressive tax shelters.. The above might be a salient point, but as for the 1/4 auditors lost and the rest: The low income (under 25k) with EITC, were the largest audited group with 298,485 of 626,204 audits performed in 2022. The rest of those earning under 200k had 250,391 audits.[] 48% of audits were under 25k income w/ EITC. 87% of audits were people under 200k income. Kind of interferes with the idea these audits were all about going after the "rich buddies." They were way more about going after the poor than they were about going after the rich. [] IRS management audit reports obtained via FOIA by via TRAC / https://tracreports.org/reports/706/ https://tracreports.org/reports/706/
- mikestew 8mo agoKind of interferes with the idea these audits were all about going after the "rich buddies." I think you misread the parent comment, who said exactly the opposite.
- jcarreiro 8mo agoThere are many, many more tax returns filed by people earning under 200k adjusted gross income than those earning more, I assume. So if there's a uniform chance that a return is audited, we would expect most audits to be done on returns under that threshold. Of course, it may not make sense to select returns uniformly at random for audits...
- mothballed 8mo agoNowhere near 48% of the population earns enough wages for EITC but still under 25k. It's way way way way overrepresented in audits. Nearly half of the audits are aimed at the poorest workers. ------- re: below due to throttling----------- .... they were audits according to IRS. This is from the FOIA'd audit numbers from IRS via TRAC.
- oklahomasports 8mo agoThey are not audits. They are automated notices to idiots trying to claim the same child tax credit in multiple returns or hiding income(not reporting their w2 lol) to claim the EITC
- lenerdenator 8mo agoAyup. Trump was able to get a stay on a case on an "allegedly" improperly-applied tax write-off for his casino's bankruptcy. It's been in limbo at least since 2016. Ten years. This is the standard operating procedure for people at that level of wealth. Which would suggest that perhaps that level of wealth doesn't need to exist in our society.
- tempodox 8mo ago> that level of wealth doesn't need to exist in our society. But then the inquisition arrives saying this is socialism or whatever.
- scottyah 8mo agoTrue, as it is just another symptom of not too much wealth, but the growing disconnect of what wealth is designed to be. Money shouldn't be power, too many people are starting to blame "too much money" instead of asking why money is turning into political power. Seemingly none of the politicians or rich people want that narrative because they all want both.
- adrianN 8mo agoHas there ever been a society were money and power didn’t go hand in hand?
- up2isomorphism 8mo agoIt will be very naive to believe adding IRS staff will help with that. It is far easier to audit W2 employees than dealing with mega corporations.
- loeg 8mo ago> It will be very naive to believe adding IRS staff will help with that. It is far easier to audit W2 employees than dealing with mega corporations. You're saying auditing megacorps is hard, but somehow more staff won't help? I don't buy it.
- pimlottc 8mo agoI think they are suggesting the lack of political will to go after big companies is the bigger problem
- up2isomorphism 8mo agoOf course it won’t help. If you have an audit target to meet you want target meta? This exactly why ICE agents tends to target illegal immigrants that actually get a job and contribute to the society instead of criminals. Because the former are easy targets. Also fundamentally the tax law in the US are intrinsically favor capital owners, especially large corporations, adding more IRS agents only cost more tax payer’s money and give regular people more headaches.
- loeg 8mo ago> If you have an audit target to meet you want target meta? I don't believe the approach the IRS takes is to set targets and only audit the lowest hanging fruit up to some target. They have different sub-organizations pursuing different goals, and some sort of vision about fairness that means going after tough cases. > This exactly why ICE agents tends to target illegal immigrants that actually get a job and contribute to the society instead of criminals. Because the former are easy targets. This is completely orthogonal, but also untrue. It's way easier to go after criminals, as long as states cooperate. The recent Trumpian ICE is more expensive and less effective than earlier regimes. > adding more IRS agents only cost more tax payer’s money and give regular people more headaches. Many, many regular people underpay the taxes they owe. Additional IRS agents help close the gap between taxes owed and taxes paid, at a cost lower than the additional revenue. Your argument is just "individual tax cheats should be able to get away with it," which I can't agree with.
- kgwxd 8mo agoOr they weren't happen with the amount of bribe money we already know they paid, and so now they're being made an example of. Standard Mob protocol.
- bilekas 8mo agoHappy you state the obvious side quest. But they're not made an example of.
- 0xy 8mo agoThis is an extremely common misconception (or lie, depending on who's saying it). The IRS, even before the cuts, targets exclusively the middle class. More agents = more middle class shake downs. 63% of the IRS' audits under the Biden admin targeted those earning sub-$200K. People earning $25K a year are MORE likely to be audited than those earning $200K, too.
- adolph 8mo ago> 63% of the IRS' audits under the Biden admin targeted those earning sub-$200K. In 2022 92.3% of filers reported income of less than $200K [0]. An audit rate of 63% is lower than what one would expect if audit-attracting behavior was evenly distributed across the population. 0. https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-statistical-tables-by-size-of-adjusted-gross-income https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-stat...
- 0xy 8mo agoThe notion that audits should be evenly distributed is nonsense. Someone making sub-$200K usually has basic W2 income, versus someone making $20M a year who likely has an extremely complicated web of capital gains, deductions, strategies, carry-forward losses etc. It doesn't even make sense from a pure cash point of view. It's better for an agent to audit someone making $20M and win a $500K judgement than it is for them to audit 1,000 $25K earners and fleece them $500 a piece. What a waste. Audits should be exponentially lopsided, not targeted exclusively at the middle class.
- adolph 8mo agoWhy bother commenting if you don't have any data to back up your assertion? You can make claims about what "should" happen but that is just your fact-free opinion.
- themafia 8mo ago> you know they're not interested in collecting Tax from their rich buddies. Right.. because.. they're busy trading favors with them. It's abuse of the public coffers.